Seven Enterprise Search Appliances That Can Save the Day - Slide 3

Google's Search Appliance (GSA) is the product in this space to which every other search appliance manufacturer compares itself. And, there's good reasoning behind that comparison: Google knows search. The GSA features Cloud Connect integrated search, People Search, Dynamic Navigation results filtering, Active-Active high availability and Sharepoint 2010 compatibility.

The GSA delivers true universal, enterprise-quality search across your entire organization. The downside to GSA's awesome power is the price. Prices actually compare pretty well with comparable appliances at the lower end of the number of documents. The price disparity begins when you want to index a million or more documents with GSA.

Out-of-control document management plagues businesses of every dimension. Duplicate documents, multiple file formats, poor filing practices, buried files, and files spread far and wide in multiple repositories are some of the common problems facing users looking for documents both living and archived. The answer is to index those documents into a central database. But how do you efficiently index thousands or perhaps millions of documents in such a way as to be both fast and efficient? The simple solution is a search appliance that performs the task for you.

A search appliance is a dedicated computer with a small footprint (1U or 2U) whose only task in life is to provide indexing and searching services to your users or customers. All appliances ship with a Web-based interface for easy administration and end-user document search and retrieval. Most search appliance manufacturers provide multiple appliance levels to fit your budget or specific indexing needs. This list of seven enterprise search appliances, identified by ServerWatch, is in no particular order.

A word of caution is in order when comparing search appliances and their pricing models. Most appliance vendors charge by how many documents you want to index. A few charge by the amount of data you're indexing, while others have no limit on the number of documents or the data volume.

Future IT leaders will need to seek technologies that eliminate silos in order to deliver the right information to the right person within the right application environment at the right time. ... More >>

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